Miriam Burgess, 89; longtime lifestyle editor at The Record

Miriam Burgess in 1973. Readers also knew her as Miriam Taylor and Miriam Petrie.

Miriam Burgess, who sharpened the focus and topicality of The Record's lifestyle pages and whose journalism career, interrupted by motherhood, spanned more than four decades, died Tuesday in Shreveport, La. She was 89.

Mrs. Burgess, formerly of Hackensack, was known professionally by various names, notably Miriam Taylor and Miriam Petrie.

Fresh out of Teaneck High School, where she was feature editor of the Te-Hi News, Miriam Stoll got a reporting job at the Bergen Evening Record.

"The story she told was she went to the newspaper's office and said she wanted to be a reporter, and the man in charge told her, "Nice girls don't do that,' " and sent her on her way, said Anne Taylor, the youngest of Mrs. Burgess's three daughters.

But Miriam, who had skipped college, kept asking to be hired and finally wore down the editor.

She left to raise a family and returned to the paper in 1961 as Miriam Petrie, Home and Family editor. She quickly put her stamp on the pages targeted to women readers.

"Having been married a couple of times and being a mother, Miriam had a true sensibility of what she, as a woman, would want to know about it. She was very astute," said Malcolm A. Borg, who joined the paper as a reporter-trainee in 1959 and is today chairman of North Jersey Media Group, which publishes The Record and the Herald News.

Borg said Mrs. Burgess brimmed with ideas about fashion, food and child-rearing coverage. She also was responsible for bringing the Ann Landers and Dear Abby advice columns to The Record. "The bosses in the newsroom didn't want to carry those kinds of syndicated columns in the paper," Borg said, but Mrs. Burgess convinced them.

Under Mrs. Burgess, Home and Family, which would become Lifestyle, tackled increasingly weighty issues, such as autism, substance abuse and women's liberation. In the 1995 book "On and Off The Record," a history of the newspaper's first 100 years, Mrs. Burgess said she was proudest of her section "really hitting the gut issues of life and using local sources and agencies to tell a story that everybody could understand.

"The woman in the comfortable house in Alpine could understand what some poor single mother was struggling with — someone she might never otherwise brush up against, but who was part of her community," she added.

The plight of the disadvantaged was of special interest to Mrs. Burgess. She received awards for her work with the homeless in Bergen County.

Ellen Levine, editorial director of Hearst Magazines, was hired out of college by Mrs. Burgess, then known as Miriam Petrie. Mrs. Burgess was Levine's boss through the '60s.

"She not only gave me the opportunity to learn how to be a good reporter, she pushed me to the wall when I needed to be pushed to the wall — but in a nice way," Levine said.

"Miriam was an image of who women would become. She showed me that you can have a career that you want to have, you can have children and love in your life, and it works. She was a role model for all women," Levine added.

Under the byline Miriam Taylor, Mrs. Burgess was The Record's restaurant reviewer in the '80s. "If someone told me I could have only one more restaurant meal in New York City, I'd opt for the blini with red caviar at the Russian Tea Room," she wrote in a three-star review of the West 57th Street landmark.

Miriam Burgess married four times. Her first husband, Edward Taylor, the father of her children, committed suicide. The next two marriages, to James Petrie and Dr. Irving Newman, ended in divorce.

She married Robert Burgess, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, in 1991, two years after she retired. They had dated as teenagers.

"That was the happiest time in her life — that marriage was the icing on the cake," her daughter said, adding that Robert Burgess dubbed his wife "the big kahuna."

The couple lived in Vermont. After Robert Burgess died in 2006, his widow moved to Louisiana to be near her children.

Mrs. Burgess, who had Alzheimer's disease, is survived by her daughters, Susan Ekstrom and Kathy Taylor of Shreveport and Anne Taylor of Irving, Texas; four grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Aulds Funeral Home in Shreveport said Mrs. Burgess's body was donated to the organization Science Care.